romanization of hebrew script 419 why the Jews, who were one component of the
region’s ethnic mosaic, did not identify with this language. Moreover, in the sovereign state of Romania Jews were granted citizenship only in 1923, an indication of their marginal status in the Romanian nation-state. The traditional languages of Romanian Jews were Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish. In Transylvania and in Banat the Jews underwent a process of Magyariza-tion, as a result of their identification with the Hungarian ruling class in the framework of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
There were thus two possible ways for Hebrew words to enter Romanian: via the language of the Bible and by mediation of the Jewish lan-guages in contact with Romanian (Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish).
The Bible was translated into Romanian from the Church Slavonic Bible, itself a trans-lation from the Greek Septuagint, and from the Latin Vulgate Bible (under the influence of Hungarian Calvinists or Austrian Catholics). Because the translations were not made from the Hebrew original, there are far fewer Hebra-isms in the registers of the Romanian language that are influenced by the Bible than in English, for instance, where the highly influential King James Version has exposed the speakers of the language to some elements of Hebrew.
Nevertheless, a number of learned Kultur-wörter have penetrated the scientific/academic registers of Romanian, for instance sabat ‘sab-bath’ (< šabb<å ). However, the common word used both in the Bible translation and in daily life is sâmb ta, ‘Saturday’, which entered Romanian through the mediation of Church Slavonic. Likewise, the term Tora (< tòr<å) is nowadays part of learned Romanian, although the corresponding term in the vari-ous translations of the Bible into Romanian is leage ‘law’, a calque-translation of Greek nomos ‘law’ through the mediation of Church Slavonic ÁaÍÓÌ zakon ‘law’.
As for Hebrew words mediated by Jewish languages, Yiddish words of Hebrew origin were occasionally introduced into Romanian, for example –adic ‘Hasidic leader’, from Yid-dish tsadik (< Hebrew ßaddìq ‘righteous, pious’).
In the 1970s, after the mass emigration of Romanian Jews to Israel between 1948 and 1960 (approximately 200,000 people, almost half of the local Jewry at the time), a special
variety of Romanian developed among Israelis of Romanian origin, a variety which mani-fests considerable Hebrew relexification. This type of ‘Israelized’ Romanian can be found in the columns of Via–a noastr , a Romanian-language Israeli newspaper. In this and other Israeli media in the Romanian language (for instance, the Israel Broadcast Authority’s news bulletin in Romanian), whatever is connected to Israel or to Jewish concepts is borrowed directly from Hebrew.
In 2004, the Israeli dairy company Tnuva (from the Hebrew word tënù <å ‘pro-duce, yield’) opened a branch in Romania. Subsequently, the word tnuva has become a generic term for dairy products in Romanian. Most Romanians remain unaware of the word’s Hebrew/Israeli origin.
As for the influence of Romanian on Modern Hebrew, it is worth noting that the name of the well-known dance the Hora ( hora) comes from Romanian hor , itself an avatar of Greek xoros ‘dance’. The interjection hayde ‘let’s go’, though its source is ulti-mately Turkish, may have entered Hebrew via Romanian, although Judeo-Spanish cannot be ruled out as the intermediary.
Cyril Aslanov (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Romanization of Hebrew Script
Romanization describes a specific form of writ-ing reform whereby a Roman-based alphabet is provided for a speech community, which has traditionally employed either a non-alphabetic script or a non-Roman alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet, or the so-called square script, is a non-Roman alphabet and has been the tradi-tional writing system for Jewish communities since the 6th century B.C.E. Romanization of the Hebrew script entails replacing the char-acters of the square alphabet with Roman characters and inventing new characters where necessary to meet the requirements of the pho-nemic repertoire of the Hebrew language.Romanization of the Hebrew script was first proposed by Isaak Rosenberg in 1898 (Raizen 1987:16–19), but the idea became popular through the efforts of Itamar Ben-Avi, son of the celebrated Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (Aytürk
420 root: medieval karaite notions 2007:628–637). He published Avi in 1927,
a short biography of his father in romanized Hebrew, as the first step in that direction. Next came a romanized Hebrew supplement to The Palestine Weekly, ha Shavua ha Pales-tini, which appeared from December 1928 to May 1929 in twenty issues altogether and sold approximately 300 copies in the Yishuv and the Diaspora. The most vocal supporter of Ben-Avi in those projects was none other than V. Z. Jabotinsky, the leader of the Revisionist Zion-ists. Finally, Ben-Avi took the most daring step with the publication of a Hebrew weekly jour-nal in the Roman alphabet, Deror, appearing from November 1933 to March 1934 in sixteen issues. The journal sold several thousand copies in its first few issues, but sales later declined to about 1000 copies. Discouraged by the failure of those attempts, Ben-Avi did not pursue the idea any longer, with the exception of publish-ing a collection of romanized Tanakh verses in 1938, entitled Yeshâyaùt. Ben-Avi’s attempts were not received warmly at all in the Yishuv, where the majority of the intellectual elite con-sidered his romanization project an insult to his father’s legacy. The Chief Rabbinate, as well, stood firmly against romanization and commu-nicated the displeasure of the religious estab-lishment to Ben-Avi on several occasions. The idea of romanization resurfaced briefly in the 1960s and 1970s, this time put forward by the brothers Yonatan Ratosh and Uzzi Ornan, standard-bearers of the Canaanite Movement. Ratosh and Ornan demanded romanization to get rid of the square script, which they saw as a relic of the Diaspora and an instrument of religious control over the Hebraic spirit and culture (Raizen 1987:41–62).
There are three major factors which account for the ultimate failure of the proposals to romanize the Hebrew script (Aytürk 2010:129). First, romanized Hebrew, in all versions pre-pared by its proponents so far, does not provide for economy of writing; from this perspec-tive, it cannot rival the square script in terms of writing with fewer and simpler characters. Second, the authenticity of the square script is firmly pegged to canonical texts of the Jewish people, namely the Tanakh and the Talmud, while the romanization project has no religious and nationalist legitimacy. Finally, all cases of successful romanization so far have been offi-cially-sanctioned and took place under
authori-tarian regimes that could silence opposition by fiat. However, neither the semi-autonomous quasi-state of the Yishuv, nor the democratic, participatory political system of the State of Israel created an environment conducive for the successful implementation of a political plan to romanize the Hebrew script.
Sample of romanized Hebrew:
Awiron Nafal be Ramallah: Ha awiron ha tzevai ‘Victoria’ asher boh tàsu 18 (shem-ona asar) hhayalim, nafal be Ramallah. Kul-lam nitzelu, be dérekh nes, mi màwet, akh 6 (shisha) me-hem niftzeu kàshé. Deror, No. 1 (17 November 1933), p. 3.
‘ ’ :
. , ( ) 18
( ) 6 , , ,
.
‘Plane Crashes (lit. ‘has fallen’) in Ramallah: The military plane Victoria, carrying (lit. ‘in which flew) 18 (eighteen) soldiers, crashed in Ramallah. Miraculously, all (on board) were survived (lit. ‘were saved from death), but 6 (six) of them were severely injured.’
R e f e r e n c e s
Aytürk, ÷lker. 2010. “Script charisma in Hebrew and Turkish: A comparative framework for explaining success and failure of romanization”. Journal of
World History 21:97–130.
——. 2007. “Attempts at romanizing the Hebrew script and their failure: Nationalism, religion and alphabet reform in the Yishuv”. Middle Eastern
Studies 43:625–645.
Nedava, Joseph. 1985. “Projects for the latinization of the Hebrew script”. Hebrew Studies 26:137–146. Raizen, Esther. 1987. “Romanization of the Hebrew
script: Ideology, attempts, and failure”. Unpub-lished PhD dissertation, University of Texas, Austin.
Shraybom Shivtiel, Shlomit. 1998. “The question of romanization of the script and the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East”. Mediterranean
Language Review 10:179–195.
Tsifroni, Gavriel. 1987. “Deror: A Hebrew journal printed left to right” (in Hebrew). Kesher 1:65–72. Weinberg, W. 1972. Reform of the Hebrew script (in
Hebrew). Jerusalem: Magnes.
÷lker Aytürk (Bilkent University, Ankara)
